A two-day product-building sprint, 32 Hour Start Up, was organised by SSN Lakshya, the entrepreneurship cell of SSN College of Engineering. Over 32 hours, participants start from an idea, go ahead to build it, and have a working prototype to demo at the end of two days.
The event kicked off at 10 a.m. on September 24 with the Idea Pitching Session. Most popular ideas pertained to Android and Web applications. Mentors — Dorai, Senthil, Suresh Sambandam, Prasannan, Vasudha, Suffiyan, Hari — gave feedback, suggestions, pointers on implementation, and those little tweaks that could take the product places.
Product-building time: With inputs from mentors, help on UI design from user interface experts Sufiyan and Vasudha, and a session on Android development by Prasannan, the teams went on to build their products.
Twentyfour hours passed and it was demo time. There were eight awesome showcases, most striking being the karaoke player by Mukund and Shahin of SSN, which impressed Senthil, CEO of RailsFactory, and he was ready to fund them on the spot!
Being the second edition, the event organisers put in more effort to improve the quality and focused on building a complete product rather than a half-cooked one. This event not only resulted in products and start-up ideas, but also motivated a lot of students to participate in coding competitions.
Seven students who met in last year's edition, applied and got selected for the Google Summer of Code — a global programme that offers stipends to student developers to write code for various open source projects. Karthik and Madhumitha of SSN were invited to present their projects at the Desktop Summit, Berlin. Sathya, Pranav, Feroze, Shiv and Yuvi were among the others who got into GSoC. Sufiyan who helped almost all the teams last time with their user interfaces was so impressive that, Mr. Suresh who came there as a mentor/sponsor offered him a post at his company, Orangescape.
